Freshman year of college has always been viewed as the wild things students do, the new friends they make and of course tough academics. A unfortunate fact is that not every single entering freshman makes it through four or more years to complete his/hers bachelor’s degree, with the highest drop out rates after only the first year of college. It makes all Universities question their effectiveness in teaching pupils, their way of conducting the learning process for undergrads pretty much their way of running everything in their institutions. Now after years of research they have came to the conclusion that what students face the most difficulty with is requirements in writing and reading at college level. What is popularly called “College readiness” means students own ability to successfully complete all college level tasks and meet deadlines now students don’t come with that “readiness” and it shows most noticeably in their research/synthesis paper. Even though that is a major factor in college success they have found that students have not been properly prepared to complete those tasks by their high schools or previous school, and for many different reasons. It is shocking and very tragic to see perfectly capable college freshman failing, dropping out or withdrawing from school because they cannot perform their college tasks and assignments.
So many factors can be blamed for students unpreparedness in their college reading and writing starting with the rules we are all taught since elementary school, “you need at least 5 paragraphs, an introduction, body, and conclusion”, brainstorming, don’t go off topic, catchy opening sentence, your conclusion should summarize your whole paper and etc. All those rules we have been taught for years now do not mean anything in college, instead we need a new mind set, a whole new way of looking and thinking about our writing and reading and even more specifically in our college research paper. In college writing to start off you’ll need the eight habits of minds, like discussed in “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”, which include curiosity, the drive to discover and explore more beyond your present limits, openness “your willingness to consider new ways of thinking and of being”, engagement your personal involvement in subjects or your own work, creativity, persistence always engaging, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition you are never taught how to use these skills in your writing. In contrast your given tons of rules to follow never questioning any idea because you see the teacher as sort of a person who has the right answer to everything that strictly interferes with flexibility, one of the 8 habits of mind, what Mike Rose concludes in his study of writers block is that students facing writers block take these rules and use them like “algorithms” instead of “heuristics” and students who did not face writers block “brought plans to the writing process that were more functional, more flexible, and more to information from the outside.” .Rules used like “algorithms functions are constant, procedures are routine, and outcomes are completely predictable” writing is never constant in that way and much less always produces something “predictable” the opposite is quite true every paper or writing is unique like the individual writing it. But as we try to implement those rules, and every other preconceived skill learned from high school we find that students get stuck, experience writers block and even end up writing “what they think others want them to write rather than looking to see what is is they want to write.” as mentioned by Sondra Perl in her research with the whole composing process.
How could we ever drift off to create some masterpiece of a research paper full of insightful research, of knowledge, of authority, of rhetorical appeal, and good reflection when all we see is black and white, wrong or right, like Kelsey Diaz points out us students strive to find the right answer or “the truth” in everything as if that was all that existed, but there is much more than that, another strong point Diaz mentions in her paper is that all no matter where a writing comes from either from a professional or not their still a human being, a human being with their own purpose of writing. In addition Penrose and Geisler go on to say that the difference in thinking between a graduate and an undergraduate (freshman) is that when it came to their research paper and how they saw their multiple, conflicting sources, the graduate made knowledge from his opinion that came from his sources, which they say as“Texts are authored. Authors present knowledge in form of claims. Knowledge claims can conflict. Knowledge claims can be tested.”. A freshman would know nothing about challenging a professionals writing much less a knowledge based claim they view as fact.
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